Elphaba's Disappearance

After the death of Ama Clutch and the disastrous audience with the Wizard of Oz, Elphaba made a sudden, irrevocable decision that severed her from every connection she had known. Standing at the carriage in the Emerald City, she told Glinda she was not returning to Crage Hall. "I'll find a place to study on my own. I'll not be part of—Madame Morrible's—school—again," she said, her words fractured by the weight of her resolve. She refused Glinda's pleas, kissed her twice, murmured "Hold out, my sweet," and then vanished into the crowds of the capital. For all her singular green complexion, she became almost instantly camouflaged in the ragamuffin variety of street life, or perhaps it was Glinda's tears that blurred her from sight. Elphaba had not cried; she had turned her head away not to hide tears but to soften the fact of their absence, leaving Glinda with the sting of a farewell that felt final.

Life Underground

For five years, Elphaba lived in hiding, her existence a secret even from those who had loved her most. She took a room above an abandoned corn exchange in a low-rent warehouse district near an army barracks, a space she furnished with a bedroll, a few crates for sitting, and a sallowwood table with elegantly carved doe's-hoof legs. The room was large but only casually arranged for dwelling, with a skylight open a few inches through which pigeon feathers and blood-and-white flux fell onto the floor. She hung odd feathers, bits of bones, strung teeth, and a wizened dodo claw on nails pounded into the wall, arranged as if for art or a spell. An elephant skull hung from a rafter, a bouquet of dried creamy pink roses emerging from the central hole in its cranium like exploding brains—an homage, perhaps, to the putative magical talents of elephants, or a grim reminder of the Animals she had tried to defend. Below it hung a crude, scratched glass oval, its reflective qualities unreliable, a looking glass that had once belonged to her childhood. She kept a white cat named Malky, whom she addressed with a sardonic familiarity, and she lived without running water, a choice that suited her profound aversion to moisture.

The Underground Activist

During these years, Elphaba went underground in a literal and figurative sense, becoming a secret operative in a network of resistance against the Wizard's regime. She adopted the code name "Fae" and worked in a cell where no one knew one another's real names, the leader's identity hidden by a masking spell that shadowed the voice and distorted the features. She told Fiyero, the only person from her past who ever found her, that she was "just a muscular twitch in the larger organism," a pack animal wheeling with the herd. Her work, she admitted, was terrorism—a campaign whose ultimate object was to kill the Wizard. She was not the arrowhead or the dart, she said, but the shaft, the quiver, a handmaiden in the shadows. The network operated with a complicated maneuver of interlocking pieces, and she knew only her small part, which she would perform without knowing the whole picture. She insisted that she had no colleagues, no self, that she had never had one, and that her motivation was merely "the movement in the gut toward food, fairness, and safety."

The Cost of Secrecy

Elphaba's disappearance exacted a heavy toll on those she left behind. Nessarose was inconsolable at first, then grew to resent her sister for putting her through the pain of separation, losing herself deeper in religion until her friends began to avoid her. The Eminent Thropp, their great-grandfather, engaged agents to search for Elphaba in Shiz and the Emerald City, but from her there was never a postcard, never a message, never a clue. She told Fiyero that she had loved them all too much to keep in touch, that the Gale Force was above torturing friends and family to get at sensitive information. She could pick up and be away in thirty seconds, she said; it was her training. When Fiyero pressed her about her father, Nessarose, and her brother Shell, she deflected, saying she had chosen to go underground so that she could not worry. She knew what would happen to Nessarose—that when the Eminent Thropp died, she would become the next Eminent Thropp—and she accepted this with a dry, fatalistic humor, noting that her sister had great taste in shoes.

The Unbecoming Self

Elphaba described her new life with a single, devastating word: "unbecoming." She told Fiyero, "I who have always been unbecoming am becoming un." The word captured both her physical appearance—her green skin, her sharp features—and her deliberate erasure of her former identity. She had given up her name so often she no longer liked to bring it out. She lived in a state of perpetual alert, her fingers twitching, her agitation barely contained. When Fiyero first found her in the chapel of Saint Glinda, she denied knowing him, insisting he had mistaken her for someone else, and only when he called her by her childhood nickname, "Fabala," did she betray her recognition. She warned him never to come again, that it was too dangerous for him as well as for her, and that if she found him trailing her, she would move. Yet despite her fierce independence, she admitted to being married—"just not to a man"—a confession that shocked even herself and brought her to tears that burned like fire on her green skin. The life she had chosen was one of radical isolation, a self-imposed exile from love, family, and the possibility of forgiveness, and she bore it with a brittle, unyielding pride.